When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does? I think that’s very unlikely, in a lot of interactions you can see an exchange where the pet is supposed to make a decision—the owner doesn’t know the right answer! When Bunny presses “ouch stranger paw” to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to “influence” that, without even being aware of the splinter? Some interactions are owner asking a question with a defined right answer, but there’s clearly much more than that happening.
they are at least able to recognize patterns and determine likely outcomes, even if they are at a more reflexive instead of reflective level. Hot dogs for example satisfy reflexive hunger based desires, instead of reflective philosophical desires to be seen as intelligent.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often. Maybe it’s normie bias cropping up :D But most people aren’t obsessively reflective. A lot of self-reflective smart people have trouble understanding what it’s like to be someone far outside that cluster because of failure of imagination: there really is barely any reflection and associations are this loose and there simply isn’t anything deeper, there’s no underlying epistemological mistake to “fix”. My point being, being reflective doesn’t preclude language ability as much as you think.
Let’s look at feral children again. Do you think they’re very reflective? Language may be a tool that is required for development of ability to be reflective, and if that is the case we will see examples of dogs starting to show a degree of reflectiveness. Arguably, we’ve seen that already with Bunny asking questions about what/why “dog”. And yes, it’s a clickbaity video, and your (and mine) immediate reaction would be “faake”, but I think all of this stuff is done in good faith, and not faked or “creatively edited”.
Just making something more convenient to study though doesn’t necessarily make the overall scientific community better I think, as it will just provide more resources to easier topics to research, not necessarily more important topics.
I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using “Clever Hans” irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.
I’ve updated in the direction of “I’ll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog” but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of
Subconscious cues from trainers—true Clever Hans effects (dogs are super clued in to us thanks to selection pressure, in ways we don’t naturally detect)
Experiment design that has obvious holes in it (at first)
Experiment design that has subtle holes in it (once the easy problems are dealt with)
Alternative explanations, of experimentally established hole-free results, from professional scientists (once the field becomes large enough to attract widespread academic attention). Like, yes, you unambiguously showed experimental result x, which you attributed to p, which would indeed explain x, but q is an equally plausible explanation which your experiment does not differentiate against.
This is based on a model of lay science that tends to show these patterns, because lay science tends to be a “labor of love” that makes it harder to detect one’s own biases.
Specifically on the volunteer-based projects, I expect additional issues with:
Selection effects in the experimentees (only unusually smart/perceptive/responsive/whatever dogs will make it past the first round of training; the others will have owners who get bored from lack of results and quit)
Selection effects in the experimenters (only certain types of people will even be aware of this research; only exceptionally talented dog trainers will stick with the program because training intelligent dogs takes so much f-ing patience, much less training dumber dogs)
There may be lines of research that conclusively establish some surprising things about dog intelligence, and I look forward to any such surprisal. But I’m going to wait until the dust settles more—and until there are more published papers because I have to work a lot harder to understand technical information conveyed by video—before engaging with the research.
While I haven’t done a rigorous study of the effect, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of suggestive and interesting phenomena eventually fall apart due to these exact reasons.
This is why I do not give much thought to this sort of stuff.
Ideally, I’d do a rigorous study of initially-interesting-but-later-fell-apart-studies or find someone else who has and then maybe I’d be better able to spend my cognitive resources...
When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does?
I’m thinking of it more as a variation on that idea. I think it’s possible that in the button case, the buttons could be stand ins for cues from an owner. Simply training with the buttons over time would modify a dogs behavior based solely on the presence or absence of the button. Work the toys in, and you’re simply training a dog to respond ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ in the presence or absence of a ‘thing’ associated with a particular sound and visual cue.
I think of lion tamers and other animals who have been trained to do tricks, like unicycling bears, and dolphins and orcas that are trained to jump through hoops when I see these types of things. Circuses things. It would be cool if dogs really could understand human language to the point where they could communicate back, but I just don’t believe it’s the case. Our brains developed complex areas devoted specifically to making and decoding speech, which depend on specific structures of our throats. These are all things all animals except for humans lack.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often.
I sometimes think modern life is just learning to inhibit our reflexive actions, which are based on our reflexive states. We do this inhibiting not only because of social training (like dog training or obedience school, what to do, not why to do it), but also because of our reflective ability (why or why not to do it), which allows us to (theoretically) do things like putting off getting rewards now for more rewards in the future, or to develop interpersonal relationship skills to try to work with people we reflexively dislike.
These are things dogs can’t do, as they involve ability to think abstractly about concepts like time and etiquette. Dogs can be trained to inhibit their reflexive behavior, and ‘act’ a particular way (don’t bite, don’t bark, come to me when I make particular sound or give a particular gesture, or press this button when they hear a particular sound) but not to reflect on why it’s important to do so.
If they can be taught to reflect like this, I have some doggy pipes and smoking jackets with a monocle and leather reading chair made specifically for dogs to be able to sit and read the paper (after they fetch it) to sell you. :)
When you say “Clever Hans” are you talking specifically about the handler’s subconscious cues determining what the dog does? I think that’s very unlikely, in a lot of interactions you can see an exchange where the pet is supposed to make a decision—the owner doesn’t know the right answer! When Bunny presses “ouch stranger paw” to indicate a splinter in her paw, how was the owner supposed to “influence” that, without even being aware of the splinter? Some interactions are owner asking a question with a defined right answer, but there’s clearly much more than that happening.
I agree that on the continuum animals are much further towards reflexive, but I just want to point out that most people inhabit reflexive states very often. Maybe it’s normie bias cropping up :D But most people aren’t obsessively reflective. A lot of self-reflective smart people have trouble understanding what it’s like to be someone far outside that cluster because of failure of imagination: there really is barely any reflection and associations are this loose and there simply isn’t anything deeper, there’s no underlying epistemological mistake to “fix”. My point being, being reflective doesn’t preclude language ability as much as you think.
Let’s look at feral children again. Do you think they’re very reflective? Language may be a tool that is required for development of ability to be reflective, and if that is the case we will see examples of dogs starting to show a degree of reflectiveness. Arguably, we’ve seen that already with Bunny asking questions about what/why “dog”. And yes, it’s a clickbaity video, and your (and mine) immediate reaction would be “faake”, but I think all of this stuff is done in good faith, and not faked or “creatively edited”.
https://youtu.be/Fn8Fx0bqzT4 https://youtu.be/vLD7GIc8kZQ
Yeah this effect can be negative.
I also mentioned Clever Hans, and you made a good point in response. Rather than sound like I am motte-and-baileying you, I will say that I was using “Clever Hans” irresponsibly imprecisely as a stand-in for more issues than were present in the Clever Hans case.
I’ve updated in the direction of “I’ll eventually need to reconsider my relationship with my dog” but still expect a lot of these research threads to come apart through a combination of
Subconscious cues from trainers—true Clever Hans effects (dogs are super clued in to us thanks to selection pressure, in ways we don’t naturally detect)
Experiment design that has obvious holes in it (at first)
Experiment design that has subtle holes in it (once the easy problems are dealt with)
Alternative explanations, of experimentally established hole-free results, from professional scientists (once the field becomes large enough to attract widespread academic attention). Like, yes, you unambiguously showed experimental result x, which you attributed to p, which would indeed explain x, but q is an equally plausible explanation which your experiment does not differentiate against.
This is based on a model of lay science that tends to show these patterns, because lay science tends to be a “labor of love” that makes it harder to detect one’s own biases.
Specifically on the volunteer-based projects, I expect additional issues with:
Selection effects in the experimentees (only unusually smart/perceptive/responsive/whatever dogs will make it past the first round of training; the others will have owners who get bored from lack of results and quit)
Selection effects in the experimenters (only certain types of people will even be aware of this research; only exceptionally talented dog trainers will stick with the program because training intelligent dogs takes so much f-ing patience, much less training dumber dogs)
There may be lines of research that conclusively establish some surprising things about dog intelligence, and I look forward to any such surprisal. But I’m going to wait until the dust settles more—and until there are more published papers because I have to work a lot harder to understand technical information conveyed by video—before engaging with the research.
While I haven’t done a rigorous study of the effect, my gut feeling is that the vast majority of suggestive and interesting phenomena eventually fall apart due to these exact reasons.
This is why I do not give much thought to this sort of stuff.
Ideally, I’d do a rigorous study of initially-interesting-but-later-fell-apart-studies or find someone else who has and then maybe I’d be better able to spend my cognitive resources...
I’m thinking of it more as a variation on that idea. I think it’s possible that in the button case, the buttons could be stand ins for cues from an owner. Simply training with the buttons over time would modify a dogs behavior based solely on the presence or absence of the button. Work the toys in, and you’re simply training a dog to respond ‘correctly’ or ‘incorrectly’ in the presence or absence of a ‘thing’ associated with a particular sound and visual cue.
I think of lion tamers and other animals who have been trained to do tricks, like unicycling bears, and dolphins and orcas that are trained to jump through hoops when I see these types of things. Circuses things. It would be cool if dogs really could understand human language to the point where they could communicate back, but I just don’t believe it’s the case. Our brains developed complex areas devoted specifically to making and decoding speech, which depend on specific structures of our throats. These are all things all animals except for humans lack.
I sometimes think modern life is just learning to inhibit our reflexive actions, which are based on our reflexive states. We do this inhibiting not only because of social training (like dog training or obedience school, what to do, not why to do it), but also because of our reflective ability (why or why not to do it), which allows us to (theoretically) do things like putting off getting rewards now for more rewards in the future, or to develop interpersonal relationship skills to try to work with people we reflexively dislike.
These are things dogs can’t do, as they involve ability to think abstractly about concepts like time and etiquette. Dogs can be trained to inhibit their reflexive behavior, and ‘act’ a particular way (don’t bite, don’t bark, come to me when I make particular sound or give a particular gesture, or press this button when they hear a particular sound) but not to reflect on why it’s important to do so.
If they can be taught to reflect like this, I have some doggy pipes and smoking jackets with a monocle and leather reading chair made specifically for dogs to be able to sit and read the paper (after they fetch it) to sell you. :)